Past Exhibitions

Telfair Museums has teamed up with local collectors in the greater Savannah area to present Savannah Collects, an exhibit of beloved treasures housed throughout the community. From eighteenth- and nineteenth-century silver, furniture, paintings, and prints to modern and contemporary art, Savannah Collects will give members and visitors a chance to see the kind of art their neighbors live […]

Since the founding of Savannah in 1733, artists have gravitated toward the city’s waterfront. Drawn from local collections, the Library of Congress, and Telfair Museums’ collection, Port City tells the story of the Savannah riverfront as depicted by artists in prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs from the 1730s to the present. Artists have captured the […]

Artist Whitfield Lovell is internationally renowned for his thought-provoking portraits and signature tableaux. In this exhibition, Lovell utilizes sculpture, video, drawing, sound, and music to create an environment that fully engages our senses and emotions. His art pays tribute to the lives of anonymous African Americans and is universal in its exploration of passage, memory, and the search […]

For more than seventy years, Helen Levitt (1913-2009) used her camera to capture fresh and unstudied views of everyday life on the streets of New York City. Roaming through the Lower East Side, Spanish Harlem and other urban neighborhoods, Levitt began her career equipped with a handheld Leica with a right-angle viewfinder that allowed her to remain unobtrusive […]

Just as photographer Helen Levitt first began drawing her inspiration from the streets of New York City in the 1940s, contemporary artist James Nares takes today’s New York streets as his subject in his mesmerizing 61-minute high-definition video Street. Nares, a native of London who came to New York in 1974, describes Street as “a love letter […]

Marilyn Monroe was an American star, but she captivated the world. Telfair Museums is pleased to present Marilyn: Celebrating an American Icon, an internationally traveling exhibition featuring dozens of works owned by private collectors in Europe, Sotheby’s archives, European art galleries and the estates of artists who interpreted the muse that was “Marilyn.” Presented in a variety of media including videos, photos […]

Assembled in honor of the late Savannah native, scholar and MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe (1946-2003), the Kirk Varnedoe Collection contains some of the finest examples of contemporary art in the Telfair’s permanent collection. This remarkable display includes pieces by some of the most pivotal artists of the past fifty years. The Varnedoe Collection celebrates the life and legacy of Kirk Varnedoe through the presentation […]

Telfair Museums presents Slavery and Freedom in Savannah in conjunction with the newly published book of the same title. The exhibition’s images, documentary accounts and objects from Telfair Museums and other collections provide a deeper understanding of our collective American past. Viewed with a wider lens, pieces such as the neoclassical tea service owned by Frances Lewis Bolton Richardson […]

Detroit-based artists Annica Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza combine fiber art with high definition video in a series of mesmerizing interactive works. In Notional Field (see front cover), vertical parallel lines of elastic cord are illuminated with a computer-generated video projection of lines. The motion of the projected lines is controlled by software which makes them […]

New York-based artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo’s works focus on the act of leaving one’s imprint for the next generation, and reflect the digital age obsession for personal archiving and the collecting of friends and contacts in social media. In For Those Who Wait, an interac­tive video sculpture about the physicality of time, Barcia-Colombo presents a collection […]